FMC Compliance

Posted: December 1, 2017January 2, 2018

Are you compliant with the FMC with your publications, NRAs, and NSAs?

A short search online will tell you that companies like yours are paying penalties to the Federal Maritime Commission for non-compliance of FMC regulations, these fines regularly range widely, and one simple case can affect hundreds of shipments, multiplying the cost. Simply publishing your Tariff Rates, Governing Rules, NRA’s and NSA’s in a FMC-compliant system may not be enough to make you compliant.

That is why at Catapult we not only built a cloud based platform that allows you to manage, publish and store your Tariff Rates, Governing Rules, NRA’s and NSA’s in one place and in super-fast time making it easy to keep up to date, but also extensively checks your filings pre-publication for many common non-compliance risks, such as commodity descriptions, duplications, similar filings and more.

This gives you greater peace of mind and helps to ensure you don’t put your reputation and hard-earned cash at risk.

Our experts have relevant industry experience and know inside and out what it takes to be compliant, they have designed our tariff tools and services to provide the most simple and effective way to manage your tariff data, giving you ease of use as well as confidence.

How often are your filings being queried or rejected pre-publishing? Rarely? Or even never? This may mean that you don’t have sufficient validation in place to capture those hard to spot, but potentially very costly, errors.

Carlos Rodriguez, U.S domestic and international transport counsel and D.C attorney, is a long time trusted advisor of Catapult. Carlos provides guidance on dealing with FMC issues to many companies, and stated to us recently “While NRAs are an exemption provided by the FMC to tariff publication of rates, many smaller, mid-sized, and even some of the larger multinationals still opt to publish rates for many reasons. For example, the smaller and mid-sized NVOCCs cannot assert sufficient control over non-affiliated overseas agents in the implementation of the NRA procedures required by the FMC in the U.S. import trade lanes. Therefore, many opt to publish port to port or point rates which they can control from the U.S. Some of the larger NVOCCs still publish rates from a centralized location to ensure that centralized pricing maintains desired rate levels.” There are, therefore, still many regulatory as well as commercial factors in play which need attention to minimize risk as well as to meet commercial demands.

Catapult also takes care of the storage of all documents related to your NRA’s, keeping everything in one place, ensuring you meet regulatory requirements for record keeping.

We can accommodate the way you want to work, Catapult offer you two service options. Have resources? Great, our platform allows you to fully self-manage your data and has built-in compliance. Don’t have the resources? No problem! We have the people to manage this for you, so you don’t have to worry about a thing!

We ensure best practices in compliance and have assembled a team of highly-qualified individuals ready to handle regulatory compliance issues, customized for your company’s needs. From tariff publication, to service contracts, to training, our mission is to help your company achieve awareness of and compliance with ocean shipping laws and Federal Maritime Commission regulations. Our services are designed to increase understanding of these regulations down to the employee level, to minimize exposure to fines and penalties, and to maximize commercial objectives.

Find out if we can save you time and give you greater compliance confidence today, contact us by filling out the below form

About Us

At Catapult, we built our first product based on a simple idea – calculating freight rates accurately shouldn’t be so difficult. We named our solution Catapult QMS®. Since then, with the help of our customers ... Read more.